


A Version of the Truth

by mamculuna



Category: Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:43:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamculuna/pseuds/mamculuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sonmi and Hae-Joo learn some truth about their world, and find something better than news. Book more than movie, but a little of both. After the visit to the slaughtership.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Version of the Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizzen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizzen/gifts).



A Version of the Truth

_Truth is singular. Its “versions” are just untruths.  
                                                            (Sonmi -451)_

_The lost fragment of the Archive’s interview with Sonmi-451, found recently in an old office in Pusan (once a city in the former Nea So Copros)._

_The Archivist asks:  After you learned what really happened at the Xultation, were you changed at all?_

To say that I felt myself to be changed at that moment would be less than true.  Even with the strong emotions I felt, many for the first time, I still felt myself to be what I had been: a server for Papa Song. I walked down the rusted ladder with no fear, I sat in the swaying boat as we crossed back to Pusan, and I was still just another Sonmi.

But when we reached the old abbey again, and I saw the Abbess look into my eyes with such sorrow, I knew she was not seeing Sonmi the server. The face I saw reflected in those dark eyes was different from the Sonmis who had gone like blind sheep to that slaughtership. On my face now there were tears, there were faint traces of lines between my brows, a sadder downturn to my mouth. No one had genomed such a face.

Hae-Joo saw it, too.  He was not a man who easily indulged in pity, but he looked at me with concern as the Abbess led us to her room, warmed with real flames. I sat beside the fire and she leaned forward to take my hands. Hae-Joo sat with us.

“You were not xpecting what you saw,” the Abbess said. “What you’re feeling is shock.”

I shook my head. “What I am feeling is disgust. I am a cannibal, isn’t that true? The Soap that keeps me alive is made from the bodies of my sisters and brothers.” 

She shook her head. “We all consume each other, one way or another. Animals eat plants, plants grow from animal waste. It is the nature of xistence.”

Hae-Joo was frowning and looking at his rolex.  I knew that he didn’t want to think about this new side of things. He had wanted me to be roused with anger, ready to fight, ready to help the Union in its fight against corpocracy. Instead of being that heroic warrior girl I’d seen in 3-Ds, I knew he thought I was giving up.

“Sonmi, you had Soap last night. You must eat it again in forty-eight hours or you cannot live.”

That was true.

“And the food you eat is nauseating to me,” I said, catching the odor of baking bread coming from the kitchen nearby.  Food servers like me, even more than other fabricants, were genomed to be unable to eat human food.

The Abbess had not yet spoken again, but now she looked up and the lite from the window showed the lines in her face, the grey in her hair.

“So you think you will just lie down and die? “ Hae-Joo’s voice was harsh and grating but his eyes were sad. I knew that he felt more than anger.

“Something else is possible,” said the Abbess, “But it is very risky. And there are hard things you must hear, both of you, before we do more.”

 

She rose and hobbled to the door, obviously feeling pain in her knees. She called to a man sitting inside the room next to us, and he came in. He was a big man, wearing a jacket with a hood that hid his face.

Until he sat down and threw the hood back, revealing scars covering his flesh.

“Wing!” I gasped.

_Wing-027 was the disaster-working fabricant who first educated you when you were sent to the student Book-Sook Kim.  You said earlier that Hae-Joo had told you that Wing was dead, killed in a student’s experiment that went wrong. Did Hae-Joo lie to you?_

I believe not. Hae-Joo looked as amazed as I was. His brows rose and he drew in breath sharply.  And he stood to clasp Wing’s hands. They had worked together for the Union long before my ascension, and Hae-Joo had told me that more than once Wing had saved him. I could see tears spring into Hae-Joo’s eyes.

Even so, he was not as happy as I was. Wing had not just saved me, he had created me. Without the knowledge his sonys had given me, without what he told me about the world, I would have been the same as Yoona-939, and probably would have died very soon. More than Chang, more than General An-Kor Apis, Wing had made me human.  I don’t know what humans feel for their mothers and fathers, but what I felt for Wing must have been much like that. To me, his scarred and twisted face was the face of life.

Wing smiled, as much as the scars would let him.

“Sonmi.”

“I thought you had died, Wing. We heard that there was an explosion.”

“There was.” Again, the attempt to smile. “It destroyed the lab, but I’m tougher than a few machines. I ran when the blast blew out the windows, and the smoke covered me.  The student Min-Sic thought I was totally incinerated, and I was glad to have him think that.”

While we spoke, the Abbess was closing the door and checking the lock. She shuffled back and fixed her eyes on Wing.

“It’s time to tell them, “  she said.

Wing leaned back and met our eyes in turn.

“You came to work for the Union, Sonmi. Hae-Joo, you have worked for the Union since you were a boy. But you don’t know what the Union is.”

Of course, I was ready to accept that. My knowledge has always been limited and imperfect, grown out of a few vids on a sony and a few quick words with Hae-Joo.

“What are you saying?” Hae-Joo stood in front of me protectively. “Are you working for Unanimity now?”

“No, but you are.” Wing’s mouth turned down at one corner with an ironic smile, but his eyes were sad.

I could tell that Hae-Joo wanted to fight, but no human could even imagine attacking something like Wing.

“Just listen. I’m not going to fight you. Just hear this.” 

“Hae-Joo,” I said, “We know Wing. Listen.”

Hae-Joo unclenched his fists and let Wing talk.

“Only a few of us know this, and if I tell you, you can never go back—not only to New Seoul, but not even to Pusan. If you don’t want to hear it, go now.” Wing settled into himself and waited.

“I will hear it,” I said. “Hae-Joo, I thank you for your kindness and for showing me so much truth, but if you leave, I will not go with you.”

“We’re sacrificing our lives and we don’t know what it’s for.”

I smiled. “And that is nothing new for me. This is the first choice I have ever made. You can make yours.”

Hae-Joo turned and started toward the door. I felt a leap of sadness. He had touched more than my body.  But I trusted Wing more than any humans. I stayed resolute.

Hae-Joo turned and looked at me, a long look. Was he beginning to hate me, or was he just saying good-bye?

And then he turned and walked back. He stopped and tilted my face to his.

“I can’t leave you. If the cost of being with you is everything else, then I’ll pay it.”

And then Wing began to talk.

_What was it he told you? Was it worth totally changing your life and Hae-Joo’s?_

It was worth far more than that. What he told us was a truth you already know.  The truth that the Union is just another part of the corpocracy, just a tool they use to scare the sheep and give even more power to the companies.  General Apis worked for the same thing as Papa Song, just in a different way. Hae-Joo didn’t believe it at first, but Wing told us of the woman who’d been with Apis one nite and had seen a message on his sony when he was sleeping. She’d run in horror from Pusan and come here to the abbey. Only the Abbess and Wing and a very few others had been told

"But now," said Wing, "your ascension is even more important. The Union planned to xhibit you as a monster to frighten all the consumers. They would never truly have given the neuro-formula to all the fabricants—they plan instead to destroy it."

Hae-Joo was still stunned, looking very much the way I had felt on the slaughtership, seeing dead versions of myself. The Union had been his life.

I don’t think Wing understood what the news had done to him. Wing hated the corpocracy, but as he talked about Apis, I began to feel that he had also had reason to mistrust the Union. As I had. I had begun to think that they too wanted me as a tool, just one that served a different meal.  I was not totally surprised to hear what Wing told us.

But then, I had read much history, and knew many tales of co-optation and deceit that Hae-Joo might never have thought about.

Wing and I gave him time to understand what he’d heard. We walked with the Abbess into the garden of the abbey. The plants were beautiful, and I was amazed to realize that the humans at the abbey actually ate the things that grew there. I’d seen 3-Ds and fotos, but this was nothing like the hydroponic labs where the food for great cities was grown. The tomato vines curled around their stakes like intricate carvings, and the flowers of the squash vines glowed with gold.

I thought of the Soap I ate, and my stomach twisted again. What Wing had told us didn’t matter. If the only food available to me was made from the dead bodies of my sisters and brothers, I would not eat again. I wouldn’t be here for the outcome of anyone’s plots.

_Because you would soon die without Soap. How many days could you live?_

Two days of health were possible for a fabricant without Soap, and maybe a few more of increasing weakness. No one had ever really xperimented, or at least they had never told us if they had. We all believed that we would die on midnite of the second day, actually. We’d been trained not to risk hurting Papa Song’s investment in us.

But that morning, looking at the sun on the peppers and the curling bean tendrils, I knew that I would find out what would happen. I would not take Soap again.

Hae-Joo’s shadow fell beside mine, and he took my hand.

“We still have the same fight,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Only now there are fewer of us and more of them. But we will end this. We have you.”

My breath caught when he said that. Was I only a tool to him, too?

“You give me courage, Sonmi.” He held my other hand, too.

But something inside me still wondered.

Later that evening, they all sat at supper, eating the cabbage I’d seen growing in the garden. But still the smell of human food nauseated me, and still I knew that I’d never take Soap again. I stayed in the office, away from those smells.

And even if I changed my mind, now that we were leaving the Union, there’d be no more Soap soon, anyway.

Wing too sat away from the odors of the food.  His voice was low.

“Sonmi. Have you had your Soap yet?”

I twisted my mouth. “Wing, do you know what Soap is?”

He nodded.

“And still you eat it?”

“There’s something else I need to tell you, but the others don’t need to know about it yet.”

I pulled closer to him.

“Please tell me, Wing. I prefer to know everything, no matter if it is painful.”

“This is not painful –not now, at least.  For now, it’s a solution. “

I waited for him to go on.

 “The neuro-formula you and I took was not complete. We have the minds and emotions of purebloods, but our bodies aren’t changed. True, we are still free of human disease, but also we still must live on Soap. And when you have sex with Hae-Joo, you are not feeling what books say women feel at such times, am I right?”

I nodded.  My body was still a fabricant’s body. I knew this.

“But the real formula, a physio as well as neuro-formula,  xists, and one of us, not a Union person, but a true fighter, has found it.”

I felt as if the sun had come out in my heart.

“Are you saying that there is a physio-formula that will make me so I can live on human food, and make my body respond to a man’s like humans do?”

He nodded. I knew the smile on my face was silly, but I was happier than I’d been since I went to the slaughtership.

“So when can we get it?”

“I’ll leave tonite, and come back tomorrow if I can. But good as this news seems now, you should realize that you will become as weak and vulnerable as a human if you take the formula.  And it will not give us an immune system.  When an illness finds us, we will die.”

I could hardly understand what he was saying.

“Sonmi, I don’t xpect to live long after I take the complete physio-formula. If you stay as you are, you may live ten or twenty years. No one knows how long an aging fabricant can live. But if you take this, some disease will take you in a year or two. And even worse, the formula itself could be contaminated. You could die just from taking it.”

“I don’t care. I don’t need to think. To live a real life, to eat food that’s not made of death, to feel passion in my body—even if it’s just for a year, for a week, it’s worth it to me.”

I grasped Wing’s scarred hand.

“And it’s worth it to you, too, isn’t it?”

“But not to me. “  Hae-Joo stood behind me—how long he’d been there, I didn’t know.

He put his hands on my shoulders and swung me around to face him.

“You can’t die, Sonmi. Not now, not in ten years. “

I was amazed to see tears on his face. 

“Sonmi.” Wing picked up his pack. “I’m going now. “

I couldn’t stay and talk to either of them. My feelings were so chaotic and disturbing that I wanted just to go to my quiet room and think. I walked slowly out the door, leaving Hae-Joo with his tears and Wing with his pack.

_And what did you decide?_

Nothing, that nite. I sat and watched the moon sink like a heavy golden bowl over the mountains. I watched the stars grow briter. And in my mind were many thoughts. Most of all I wondered if Hae-Joo could ever really understand what it meant to me to become fully human.  If I stayed as I was, eating Soap, living more years, he could touch my body, love me as much as he wanted—no matter what I felt.

And more, I would still be something useful in his fight. And that fight was another thing to think about. Hae-Joo was pureblood, so what made him dedicate his life to ending the enslavement of fabricants? I knew he thought of himself as selfless and compassionate, but I wondered whether really he worked only for his image of himself as the great freedom fighter, like a little boy pretending to be a superman.

And after so many surprises, so many twists and revelations, I wondered if maybe somehow he still worked for the corpocracy. Nothing he had done that could not have been an act, a pretense to convince me and Wing to reveal our secrets.

How could I trust him?

And behind that, bigger questions. What would I be if even my body were human?  Could I really face death as fearlessly as Wing did?

And could I really choose what I wanted, or was there part of me that was nothing but obedience?

My head was full of chaos and my heart was full of fear. In the darkness, I felt as though I had been struggling with this for so many years, so many more than the three years since I’d been activated.

It was as though I’d been fighting for so long to get what I wanted, to escape what I feared. Confused images of ships and speeding fords flashed through my mind, but behind them was the terrible sense of missed opportunities. I remembered something the Abbess had said: that not everything dies when the body dies, but somehow we live again to try again.

I saw the stars grow dim as the sky shaded from black to blue again. I thought of how this time I, just a fabricant, had the chance to choose not to run from fear or be lost in confusion.  I had the chance to choose for myself, true, but also I could do something for other—people?  Yes, the fabricants we could save would be people. And if I could help even one of them to have some real life, that would be more than I might ever have done before. I thought of the bodies swinging from hooks in the terrible ship, and I knew I had to try to mend the broken world. Even if it was too late, it was what I had to try.

The first lite strengthened into full sun on the mountains before I went down to the office where the Abbess worked.

But it was Hae-Joo who sat there, his reddened eyes and drawn face telling me that he too had spent a sleepless nite.

I started to leave, but he stood and reached out his arms to me.

“Sonmi.”

I shook my head.

“Hae-Joo, I have to tell you what I thought about last nite.”

We sat in the desk chairs and he watched me sadly while I told him all my fears and doubts.

“Hae-Joo, you want me to live, but what you want—is it me? Or is it what I can do for you—the same reason why Papa Song wanted me?”

He shook his head slowly and raised sad eyes to mine. He reached out and took my hand.

“Sonmi, I thought these same thoughts, too.  If I really care about you, I have to want you to love me the same way. And I do. I can’t use your body as a mechanical doll. I can’t use your voice and image like a 3-D of some old-time hero.”

My mind grew calmer, but still a whisper of suspicion reminded me that even this could be pretense. Only if he were willing to let me risk death—that was the only way I’d have believed him.  But then I remembered the resolution I’d reached at dawn. I smiled and touched his face.  Whatever he was, I couldn’t know. But I knew what I was.

We walked in the mountains until the sun sank again, not talking, just thinking as we walked. At last we saw Wing’s suzuki sling itself around the last curve, coming back with the formula.

We walked slowly back through the twilite.

Wing was already in the office with the Abbess. She had a needle waiting.

“I’ve already taken the new formula,” said Wing.  But his face looked pale and sweaty.

“Are you well?” I said anxiously.

“Maybe I should lie down.” He staggered out.

I took a sudden deep breath. Was Wing dying already? Was the formula hopeless?

The Abbess saw my worry. “It’s a shock to the system, Sonmi. He may just be having a normal reaction. Now his body is becoming human, this is the first physical reaction he will have. And you should prepare yourself—you’ll feel that too.”

I looked at Hae-Joo.  He took my face in his hands and kissed me.

“Sonmi—“ he held back tears, I was sure.

He tried again and found his voice.

“Take it, Sonmi.  Take the chance and live whatever life there is.”

I held out my arm to the needle.

_And clearly you survived._

I was sick for many days, but yes. Soon I was eating the food from the garden, soon I was xperiencing the rapture of the body with Hae-Joo.   I was sick many times, but I grew stronger gradually. I worked in the garden. I ran and swam. I laughed. I scratched my arm and caught a cold, but I lived, completely

_And then?_

And then you know the rest.  You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.

_That is true. If you hadn’t brought the formula to my library, I wouldn’t have ascended. We would not be ready to go out to change the world, or at least a little piece of it for a little while. Thank you, Sonmi, for helping me and all of us. Thank you for recording your story and our story for those who will come later. You will not be forgotten, whatever happens to us now._

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to LIzzen! I know you wanted the movie version, but unfortunately I'd read the novel too many times and was imprinted by that. I tried to take it a little more in the direction you wanted, but maybe without success. I also apologize for the first-person POV--again, I knew you didn't love that, but it went along with the book version.
> 
> ETA: Meant to add this earlier. The line about mending the broken world is from William Penn: "Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world." And don't know if he got it from there, but it calls to mind the Hebrew "tikkun olam"-- "healing and restoring the world." (Mitchell's mostly Buddhist, like me, but as George Takei points out, Buddhists are often polytheistic as well as non-).


End file.
